PennDOT upgrades traffic radio signal

ROAD WARRIOR

Q: As far as I'm concerned, PennDOT might as well scrap the traffic reports they broadcast at 1630 AM. No matter where you are, it is virtually impossible to get clear reception. The station fades in and out, adjusting the volume does little to improve it, and heaven forbid if you want to pick up traffic reports while driving near power lines! If this information is deemed helpful and important, you'd think the powers that be would take steps to move the broadcast to FM, or find ways to boost the wattage.

— Walt Needham, Allentown

A: I know what you're saying, Walt, the sonic quality of PennDOT's Highway Advisory Radio at 1630 AM makes the state's roughest roads seem like brand-new concrete superhighways by comparison.

But wait! as they say in TV infomercials. Have you tuned in to 1630 in the last month or so?

If it's been awhile, you might be surprised at the "new" signal quality, which I consider to be a fairly big improvement over the scratchy, wavering sound of years past, a signal that faded in and out so badly that portions of the message were completely lost.

For the first time in probably six months, I hit the 1630 button about a month ago, prompted by one of PennDOT's electronic message boards on eastbound Route 22 east of Cedar Crest Boulevard, and was pleasantly surprised.

I was greeted by one of those soothing, if somewhat mechanical-sounding computerized female voices, and though it couldn't match the clarity or the rich tone of FM stereo, it seemed to have steered a lot closer to those qualities compared with the signal I remembered. Less static, and more bass (you don't want too much bass for voice reproduction, but more was needed in this case), and greater reception stability are new features of the HAR system in PennDOT's Allentown-based District 5.

District 5 disc jockey Tom Walter said some of the transmitters and receivers at the broadcast "stations" along the region's major highways were replaced, repairs were made, and the transmitters were adjusted to reduce the "overlap" between the signals roughly in late February, which would fit with my first experience with the boost in signal horsepower.

I've tuned in a bit more over the past few weeks, noticing that even the new, improved signal has good days and bad days, or maybe good hours and bad ones. To my ear, it still lags slightly behind the Turnpike's HAR signal at 1640 AM, where the simulated voice sounds more like a real woman speaking.

Weather and other atmospheric conditions can affect the quality of any AM signal, Walter said, and HAR might suffer those effects more because of the low power: The Federal Communications Commission sets a transmitter speed limit of 10 watts for all HAR stations. Commercial AM radio stations broadcast at up to 50 kilowatts, or 5,000 times the torque of HAR. The feds also cap the HAR antenna height at about 50 feet (actually it's 49.2 feet, because the specified value is 15 meters) and impose other restrictions.

HAR hit the American showroom floor in 1977, and arrived in the Lehigh Valley in 1998, with the start of the infamous "Route 22 Renew" reconstruction project. There are five stations in all on I-78 and Routes 22 and 309, Walter said. A contractor made the recent repairs and tweaked the transmission patterns for about $3,500, a bargain-basement sticker price in terms of highway spending. Walter couldn't recall the tab for installing HAR 13 years ago, but said it probably would cost $70,000 to $90,000 per station today, or $400,000 for the five Valley locations.

Walter doesn't envision HAR being driven off the road any time soon, Walt. While acknowledging the bends in the road posed by new technologies, he said District 5's HAR stations are paid for, and with low maintenance costs, there's little reason to shut off the engine.

"Not everybody has GPS and cellphones," he said. He's right: My friend Doug refuses to get a cellphone, on principle, though I'm not sure of the nature of that principle. Still, there's at least one Pennsylvania resident remaining who does not possess a mobile phone.

"HARs are one of the most widely used types of [Intelligent Transportation System] devices in Pennsylvania," PennDOT spokesman Steve Chizmar wrote in an email. Only two of 11 districts do not use HAR, he wrote: Philadelphia-based District 6, where traffic reports are widely available on commercial radio, and rural District 3 in north-central Pennsylvania.

On the other side of the road, Chizmar said HAR might run out of gas at some point. "As navigation systems become standard in new vehicles, the need for certain types of ITS devices, such as HARs, may be reduced in the future," he wrote.

Walter agreed that the scenery farther down the road is hard to see. "I don't know about the long-term future" of HAR, he said.